Tears shed and flags waved as 200 New Yorkers became U.S. citizens Saturday during a special naturalization ceremony on the city’s famous Ellis Island that once welcomed thousands of immigrants a day.
Citizenship candidates from about 60 different countries gathered in the great hall of the former immigration station, where about 12 million people entered the United States over the course of six decades in the early 20th century.
The ceremony, the first of its kind on the island since 2016, marks the anniversary of the signing of the constitution in 1787 and kicks off the government’s annual “Citizenship Week”.
The 200 new U.S. citizens are among 19,000 to be sworn in across the country this week, the U.S. Immigration Service said.
As sunlight streamed through the huge arched windows, the emotion was palpable in the room as the group swore an oath of allegiance to the United States less than a mile from the Statue of Liberty.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland presided and told the latest American citizens, “This country – your country – welcomes you with all its heart.”
The Justice Department head choked back tears as he recounted how his own relatives fled religious persecution in Eastern Europe.
He said that two of his grandmother’s siblings could not escape and died in the Holocaust.
“I’ve often thought about how members of my family felt as they passed through buildings like this,” he said. “And I’ve often thought about what their decisions meant for my own life.”
Before the ceremony, Lovell Brown, a 31-year-old originally from Jamaica, told AFP she was excited to be on the island for “such a big moment” for the first time.
“I just feel like a part of the United States now,” said the teacher, who has lived in the United States since she was 17.
“It makes me feel like I belong here.”
– immigration series –
The ceremony came amid a cloud of increasingly politicized controversy over the arrival of undocumented migrants in the United States.
It comes a few days after about 50 migrants unexpectedly arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, a popular vacation island in Massachusetts, where Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had sent them in a highly political move.
Right-wing American governors have bused migrants into cities populated mostly by Democrats to denounce President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, which they say have allowed undocumented migrants to cross the border into Mexico in large numbers.
On Thursday morning, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent two buses carrying migrants near Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence in Washington, a location deliberately chosen as she oversees the divisive issue of immigration for the White House.
Garland alluded to the country’s political tensions in general.
“Overcoming the current polarization in our public life is and remains a difficult task,” he said. “But we cannot overcome it by ignoring it.”
The pandemic triggered backlogs of naturalization applications and slowed down the naturalization process.
According to the latest annual report from the US Department of Homeland Security, 814,000 people became citizens in 2021, up 30 percent from the year before, when the Covid-19 epidemic brought much of public life to a standstill.
– “I have found my home” –
Umaru Kabir Ahmed, 63, has lived in the United States since 1989 after leaving his native Nigeria.
The Bronx resident, who works at a nursing home, said he first applied for citizenship in 2012.
“I’m happy,” he said, explaining that his new documents reflect the American sensibility he’s cultivated in his three decades here.
“A lot has changed — the way I speak, how I eat, how I sleep, how I dress,” he said.
About 40 percent of current US citizens can trace their ancestry back to Ellis Island, which opened in 1892.
Today it is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, open to the public via ferry and managed by the National Park Service.
At its peak in the early 20th century, thousands of people passed through Ellis Island every day — waiting in long lines for medical and legal evaluations that sometimes resulted in imprisonment, separated families, or denied entry.
The contrast of the naturalization ceremony to the conditions immigrants faced at the time didn’t escape the eyes of Warren Lawson, a 44-year-old South African British citizen who has lived in the United States since 2016.
He said he feels fortunate to be on the island and “to learn about the history and see it firsthand.”
Lawson said he wanted citizenship because “this is probably where my kids are going to live for the rest of their lives, and I want to grow old in the same place as them.”
